Gruber gets my goat like very few other writers do.
Not because he's wrong, because he's usually right.
Not because he's shallow, because he's usually very deep and insightful.
Not because he's rude, because he's polite even when dismissing other's stupid observations.
It's in spite of all this.
I think it's because I know before reading a Gruber piece what its conclusion will be, namely "Apple did something great, amazing and innovative. Here's how and why."
There's no surprise in his conclusions. If it's about an Apple product or decision, I know what the ending will be.
P.S. Sure there may be a few times when Gruber has criticized Apple, but to me they feel statistically insignificant.
I think Gruber is usually either wrong, or right for the wrong reasons.
His articles read like he is constructing a narrative to fit a particular conclusion and world view. The people that I know in advertising/marketing all know that a lot of what they say is bullshit. I imagine its the same with Gruber - I dont think even Gruber believes Gruber.
Given that it's obviously possible to independently agree with most of what Apple does and think that that what they are doing will be successful (which in reality has turned out to be the case), what exactly is it you're accusing Gruber of?
He's now a "trusted reviewer" who is given access to pre-release units. That helps him write these articles before anyone else, which helps him get page views and eventually revenue. Therefore, he is corrupted. Given how Apple treats its reviewers, it is completely reasonable to believe that he might lose his "trusted reviewer" status if he wrote a negative review of a new product. He is not independent, so his reviews cannot be seen as independent.
I'm accusing him of being like "Apple makes you feel good, you should admit it": Apple doesn't make me feel good, their phones are too tiny, they look pretty but I'm sick and tired of their design, they cheat with their prices, they abuse software developers.
Their software is easy and intuitive to use but is too much rigid for my tastes.
IMHO he speaks like if people with my opinion shouldn't exist.
It's not John Gruber's fault that Apple hits all these home runs. When Jordan's Bulls won title after title it wasn't hard for sports fans and journalists to keep saying how they were the best.
Eventually Apple is going to strike out with a major release but, at as far as phones go, this wasn't the year.
If Apple was judged on its merits, instead of through the reality distortion field, and managed to hit it out of the park every time, that would be one thing. But that's not how it works.
Apple has its cadre of reviewers, Gruber included, that manage to find something good to say no matter what Apple does, generally ignoring or whitewashing over the negatives.
Remember Apple Maps? It was a disaster. People got fired over it. Yet, Gruber found a way to write positively about it.
And yet he constantly attacks advertising-based products ... of which his blog is one, though he did try, and fail, to make it subscription only at one point.
If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer!
There are a few few features, hardware and software, that Apple is behind in, even with the release of the 5S. Most of the software can be downloaded and installed on the phone. The hardware (I'm thinking about the camera) can not.
Agreed. You can see that he criticizes Apples cloud offerings. iCloud, Siri. They still have to mature and improve.
But the rest, I agree with Gruber 100% that it is apparent that Apple does not play the specs game like other companies simply to have a nice spec sheet you can read off like a Baseball trading card. They put in their devices things that are "fast enough" to achieve what they want to achieve. And it is apparent they are very good at that seeing as what kind of performance and thus resulting user experience they can get out of the hardware they use.
I still remember the times Android fans were raving just how much faster their phones were compared to iPhones just because it said so in the spec sheets. But when you actually used them, you would have a hard time not to laugh at just how jittery and overall unpleasant it was navigating through the Android UI. It was no contest compared to the iPhones back then.
Carefully thought out yes, but often when there is imperfection that's carefully thought out too.
For example the cameras in the early iPhones were very deliberately below par specifically so that they could ramp up the camera quality with each new model as an incentive for owners to upgrade. Imperfect by specification, but perfect business execution. I say this as someone who bought into iPhones with the 3G and never regretted it, but it's the truth.
With screen sizes, I would prefer a slightly larger screen size on my current iPhone 5. I do think Apple will eventually go to a greater screen size, but if so they will do it because they need it as a differentiating factor for a new model. I was half expecting them to do it this time because I couldn't think of a compelling new feature that the next model would need, but I didn't know about the move to 64bit, TouchID and M7. This time they had enough new features that they didn't need to move to a bigger screen.
> [T]he cameras in the early iPhones were very deliberately below par specifically so that they could ramp up the camera quality with each new model as an incentive for owners to upgrade.
That’s quite an accusation you’re making. Do you have any sources to back that up? I read a lot of tech news and I’ve never come across anything like it.
IIRC it was widely discussed at the time. I don't remember ever seeing any other reason tendered as to why the early cameras were so far below the specs of other contemporary phones. Do you have an alternative theory?
> the early cameras were so far below the specs of other contemporary phones.
I don’t think that was the case at all. The original iPhone had a better camera than my high-end SonyEricsson smartphone did at the time.
Also, the camera on the iPhone 3G was exactly the same as the camera on the original iPhone, so it couldn’t have been used as a way to people to upgrade their phones.
Apple tries to get people to upgrade every two years, not every year. The difference in photo quality between an iPhone 3GS and an iPhone 4S or an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 5 is immense. However, all of those models were among the top camera phones when they were new.
Here's what Engadget's review of the original iPhone had to say about the camera that, as you say, wasn't upgraded for another two years:
"..it's still a lousy sensor by even ultra low-end dedicated camera standards, so we'd recommend this not be used in the field for anything but the occasional candid shot"
Ars Technica compared it semi-favourably to low end camera phones, but:
"..Another glaring omission is the lack of video capabilities in the iPhone's camera: something that many very basic (and much cheaper) handsets can do"
It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't anything special, lacked many features found on much cheaper phones and again wasn't upgraded for two full years. By that time it's camera capabilities were woefully behind even the most basic camera phones. Here's what Macworld said about the 3G:
"For a product as on the cutting edge as the iPhone, its built-in camera is an embarrassment"
IMHO the reason they didn't upgrade the camera on the 3G was that they didn't have to. They were selling as many of them as they could make and being in a class of their own had essentially no competition. As I said, they kept improving this feature in reserve for when they needed it. This isn't really a criticism, I loved my 3G, but this is Apple's modus opperandi.
So you have zero proof or sources that Apple deliberately held back better camera parts in order to sell more iPhones the next year. Such a thing could only possibly have been the case with the iPhone 3G, as all later models have had best-of-breed cameras. Unless you want to tell me that at the time Apple made the original iPhone they could have bought the 3GS camera in volume.
Both the original iPhone reviews you linked to are positive about the iPhone camera’s photo quality compared to other phones. They mention the quality was bad compared to point-and-shoot cameras, but that was the case with all camera phones.
At the time the iPhone was announced, I had just bought a SonyEricsson P990. It was SE’s top-of-the-line product and it cost Euro 700. It had a 2MP camera, just like the iPhone, but the photos it took were terrible compared to those taken on an iPhone.
Not because he's wrong, because he's usually right.
Not because he's shallow, because he's usually very deep and insightful.
Not because he's rude, because he's polite even when dismissing other's stupid observations.
It's in spite of all this.
I think it's because I know before reading a Gruber piece what its conclusion will be, namely "Apple did something great, amazing and innovative. Here's how and why."
There's no surprise in his conclusions. If it's about an Apple product or decision, I know what the ending will be.
P.S. Sure there may be a few times when Gruber has criticized Apple, but to me they feel statistically insignificant.